Ahjvar came into the Marakand story as a catalyst for disaster, the assassin who kills the Lady, or the Voice of the Lady (when I first conceived the story I hadn’t quite settled on how the Lady and the Voice interacted or if they were even truly separate entities), and sets off the civil war in Marakand. He was grim, angry, very troubled, and under a curse. And a grim, angry, very troubled guy wandering around entirely on his own is — really rather dull. His character needed a foil and gave birth to one almost at once as I began writing him, and thus Ghu was born. Ghu, very briefly, was one of those orphaned children my characters seem to acquire. (I blame Glen Cook.) That lasted for one draft of a few pages, and then Ghu gave me a Look and became Ghu, a young man nineteen or twenty-ish, age somewhat indeterminate both because he doesn’t know and because sometimes he finds it useful to be assumed younger than he is, an innocuous youth. Time’s a bit of a confusion for him anyway. Already, though his nature is a bit of a mystery, he seems possessed of a deep calm and assurance, a watchful stillness. Definitely not Ahjvar’s servant, whatever the two of them choose to let people assume. He’s appointed himself to look after Ahjvar. Why? If Ahjvar needs him for some grounding in his fading sanity and humanity, Ghu just as much needs Ahjvar, who gives him, he later thinks, words. And the warmth, the affection and acceptance his abuse-filled life has so lacked. That first scene of the two of them sitting together by the wall on the clifftop keeps coming back in subsequent times, right into Gods of Nabban and beyond.

The Leopard: Marakand Book One, cover by Raymond Swanland

Ahjvar, without Ghu, wasn’t likely to ever have been more than a passing character, an instrument of the plot, swiftly doing his thing and coming to an end at the Lady’s hand, leaving chaos for Holla-Sayan and that late lamented main character who got cut from the story to sort out. With Ghu, he became a hero, however filled with internal struggle and darkness his road.

Gods of Nabban, cover art by Raymond Swanland

Ghu, too, became more, because of Ahjvar. Not a holy innocent, not a merely a foil for Ahj to show up against, he was growing all the time, revealing more and more of his secrets — needing to, as Ahjvar fell further into darkness. Neither worked as a character without the other, which, as I realized that, began to shape them both. That other significant couple of the stories, Moth and Mikki, could exist and act without one another (though they’d both be different people if they’d never paired up, of course). Ahjvar and Ghu could not, without it being so shattering a thing that, if I did it, the separation of the two would have to be the heart of the story. The Ghu of Gods of Nabban could not exist without Ahjvar as part of what he is; by the end of The Lady, Ahjvar could not exist, literally, but for Ghu. (Read that sentence twice, paying attention to “for”; it works both ways.) Even by the end of The Leopard, it’s Ghu shaping the story of these two, not Ahjvar.

And emotional and psychologically-tangled as that is, that’s all something that exists alongside the other aspect of their relationship, the fact that from the start, Ghu’s complex — or maybe burningly simple — love for Ahjvar had a romantic and sexual layer to it. I didn’t send Ahjvar and Ghu to Marakand intending for that relationship to develop as it did, though in the caravan road world there’s no stigma attached to same-sex relationships. Ivah’s mostly attracted to women; Nour and Kharduin are a long-established couple (and their past was a romantic story I did want to write, but it didn’t fit in as more than an anecdote — someday it’ll end up a short story, maybe. And the story of Ivah and her poet-consort, too.) Ghu was from the start bisexual, which wasn’t something I thought about consciously. Like so much else about that character, it just was who he was. And Ahjvar’s past relationships had been with women; that was just him, too.

Ahjvar and Ghu very clearly loved one another, needed one another, but that didn’t have to mean a romantic love or a sexual relationship and at first I wasn’t thinking of it implying one. There are many loves and that there aren’t many really devoted non-romantic loves between non-siblings in fiction doesn’t mean that such relationships don’t exist, in reality or fiction, and initially that was what I thought I wanted to explore — a really intensely-felt, mutually dependent, non-sexual relationship. The fact that Ahjvar was rabidly celibate and that his distant past relationships had both been with women might also have seemed a bit of a hindrance to anything romantic Ghu might want to develop between them, except that when I was partway through the whole Marakand story and reread it, I realized that for a man who was a) rabidly celibate and b) presumed not to be interested in men, Ahjvar seemed awfully physically aware of Ghu, all the time.

All right then, I thought. If that’s what he wants, whether he knows it or not, let’s see where that goes, as another facet of their complex and mutually-dependent existence, and how that affects other things in both their lives and the larger plot as the story flows from The Lady into Gods of Nabban. And beyond.

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About K.V. Johansen

The author of Blackdog, The Leopard, The Lady, Gods of Nabban, and The Last Road epic fantasies from Pyr, I also write for teens and children, including the "Torrie", "Warlocks of Talverdin", and "Cassandra Virus" series, and the "Pippin and Mabel" picture books, as well as a couple of short story collections and two works of adult literary criticism on the history of children's fantasy literature. I have a Master's degree in Mediaeval Studies, and read a lot of fantasy, science fiction, and history. Blog at thewildforest.wordpress.com